The Answer to the AnswerTips Widget

We posted a quick review of the AnswerTips Widget the other day. Unfortunately, the short review resulted in a comment that has bugged us for a couple of days. That comment, in conjunction with some user comments over on Widgetoko’s post on the same topic, has pushed us to prototype a Search Widget much like AnswerTips. In our opinion, it adds some features that we feel are beneficial to the users.

Comments are always welcomed. But, to avoid any confusion, we are not disclaiming the value of the AnswerTips widget. We happen to think it has potential. What we are doing is illustrating some features that we feel are useful to users, especially to users with the same mindset/browsing practices that we have. There will obviously be users who browse differently or think differently.

Currently only tested and verified to work with Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7.

Highlight text and then press q (on this site) to see how the prototype search widget works.

Please understand that this is a prototype and does have issues. Feel free to provide feedback. If you are experiencing problems, make sure that the page fully loads. There are several test widgets on this site which cause long load times.

You probably just missed some changes. We got a little sidetracked integrating the widget with the site. If you try again, you will notice all search result pages have been integrated with stickiwidgets.com so viewers never really leave the site, unless they visit a result link.

As for the page load, we have a solution for it. Unfortunately, the sidetrack meant that we didn’t work on any performance issues. This should be addressed tomorrow.

I had another quick look at your widget and noticed one thing. When I read a web page I track where I’m reading by highlighting text. I’m constantly clicking/highlighting text.

Given this [compulsive] behaviour your search widget keeps popping up and down and it does get distracting. I know others who read in a similar fashion, although I’m not entirely sure how common the practice is.

Getting around this problem may be a little tricky given your onmouseup(?) event which fires. That certainly may be a good argument for why AnwerTips when with the double-click.

I see you put in a fix to close the bubble when you click elsewhere on the page, but it appears you must click within the content area. Personally I think the onclick close-bubble event should be attached to whole page. To reproduce:
1. Highlight text within content area.
2. Click outside the bubble inside the content/blog-post container element and the bubble should close.
3. Highlight some text again.
4. Click to the far left or right of the page in the white-space, the bubble follows your click and does not close (at least in FireFox).

This is definitely a tricky issue. As we mentioned before, the issue with this concept is process flow and usability. Everyone works slightly differently and it’s hard to accommodate everyone or change everyone’s mindset.

With your feedback we will continue to refine this widget and hopefully develop something useful. Please check back for updates periodically.

This is really, really awesome.
I love the ‘q’ initiation. It’s a great way to stop spamming the crap out me – like others, I tend to highlight and click as I read, partly because if I get distracted by something else, I can easily see where I left off.

Regarding user education:
Perhaps you could have some kind of timer, where if a piece of text remains highlighted for a long period, you pop up a small div saying ‘did you know…?’.

Or, at the top left of the screen, there’s a small div saying ‘sws enabled’ which offers more when you mouseover?